Hardware core-to-core communication

Everyone who buys a new PC almost always asks about number of cores in a processor. This parameter play important role in processor speed estimation. To be true a core is a small processor which can make calculations independently. Modern computers really can do different tasks at the same time. Cores in a processor must communicate and exchange results from time to time. Until today software was the only method of the communication among cores. Until today, because researchers from North Carolina State University and the Intel Corporation just have developed hardware method to coordinate efforts between cores for multiprocessor operations. And this new way will significantly accelerate core-to-core communication.

This approach, called the core-to-core communication acceleration framework (CAF), improves communication performance by two to 12 times,” says Yan Solihin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State.

The key to the CAF design is queue management device (QMD) which is a small device which is able to do simple calculations and keeps track of communication request regardless of software routines. If you take into account that QMD can perform calculations on data from all cores and you use this property, you will increase the processor’s speed by 15%.